Speaking of Psychology: Using your mind to find love, with Ty Tashiro, PhD

There are few things in life so strongly tied to our overall happiness as a stable and happy marriage. In this episode, psychologist Ty Tashiro, PhD, gives advice and tips on how to use psychological science to find lasting love, showing us that using our heads, and not just our hearts, can lead to our happily ever after.

Ty Tashiro, PhD, is author of the book “The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Loveopens in new window.” He was awarded Professor of the Year at the University of Colorado and University of Maryland and he has been published in top-tier academic journals, including Psychological Science and American Psychologist. Tashiro is an expert on relationship breakups, enhancing long-term relationships and online dating. His research continues to focus on interpersonal relationships and how to translate compelling findings from laboratory studies into practical treatments. 

Tashiro received his bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and his PhD in psychology from the University of Minnesota. During his graduate studies, he developed research interests in emotion in close relationships, coping with relationship loss and growth following traumatic events.

Audrey Hamilton: Looking for and successfully finding love is not easy for most people. Online dating has made it a little easier, but knowing what to look for in a partner is something many people still struggle with in the modern dating world. In this episode, we talk with psychologist Ty Tashiro who gives advice and tips on how to use psychological science to find lasting love, showing us that using our heads, and not just our hearts, can lead to our happily ever after. I’m Audrey Hamilton and this is “Speaking of Psychology.”

Psychologist Ty Tashiro is an author and researcher who studies the psychology of relationships – why some relationships last and others don’t. His work has been published in top-tier academic journals, including the American Psychological Association’s flagship journal, American Psychologist. He is also author of the book “The Science of Happily Ever After.” Welcome, Dr. Tashiro.

Ty Tashiro : Well, thanks for having me.

Audrey Hamilton : We’re often told to follow our hearts when we’re looking for love. Is that really the best advice or is there a better way to go about it?

Ty Tashiro : Well, that’s a great question. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with following your heart. Love is primarily an emotional thing. I think we can overthink it if we’re not careful so we don’t want to, we don’t want to kill the romance or kill the heart part of it with the head. But I do think that people can probably benefit from using their head just a little bit more when it comes to really one of the most important decisions they’ll make, which is who they choose to be with for the rest of their life.

Audrey Hamilton : Yeah. Can you talk about how their head needs to become involved in finding the right person?

Ty Tashiro : Sure. Yeah, well I think it’s hard to get your head involved when you’re with a new person. When we fall in that passionate love, we get the butterflies in the stomach, your head is spinning, it’s really hard to be rational and measured about things and have good foresight.

I think actually in between relationships is a great time – and there you have these great windows of clarity where you can reflect upon what’s worked or what hasn't worked in previous relationships. And also set some goals or some strategy for what you want to do differently going forward. And that then kind of directs peoples’ attention to traits that might be desirable that they usually don’t go for – or puts them on alert for traits that are not good for them that they've had in the past.

Audrey Hamilton : This leads into what you’re talking about the three wishes within which you’re choosing someone to be with. Can you explain what you mean by that? You know, is there not one perfect person for everyone, that fairy tale romance?

Ty Tashiro : Well, it’s hard to argue with fate. You never know what the evidence is against it, I guess. But I think there’s probably more than one person for people, but we also – a lot of the research shows that people want a lot of things, a lot of ideal traits or characteristics in a partner. And that’s great to have high aspirations, but I think that prioritizing the order in which or the importance of these traits would be a wise thing to do. Because there are some studies that find that people wish for everything and then they end up getting very little of what’s actually important to them in a romantic partner. So if people can have their top three prioritized, the good news is they have pretty good odds of getting those traits in their romantic partner.

Audrey Hamilton : Can you give us an example of what you’re talking about? Three traits?

Ty Tashiro : Well, it could be personality characteristics, like extraversion or agreeableness. It could be physical characteristics, like being hot or being tall. And, I’ll give you an example of how that might work when you just do the math with it. So let’s say there’s someone who wants a man who’s tall and to him or her that means he’s 6-foot or taller. Well, only 20 percent of men in the United States meet that criteria. So if there is a room of 100 eligible bachelors that would mean that 80 of those men would be disqualified at that point. Now, if this person wanted someone, let’s say, with a college education, you’d lose about two-thirds of the remaining people so now you’re down really to just about four people after two wishes. So you can see after three wishes for traits, you really eliminate a lot of possibilities.

Audrey Hamilton : So those are the odds behind why you just can’t find the right, the right person?

Ty Tashiro : Sure.

Audrey Hamilton : People are always … yeah.

Ty Tashiro : It happens in real life where, online dating’s a great example, where people will set certain criteria with the mentality that it’s a preference, but actually you’re just completely ruling someone out if you say, “I don’t want someone of this religious affiliation or this type” or whatever else it might be. It actually cuts out a lot of people that might have had traits that you really wanted.

Audrey Hamilton : Do you encourage people to do the online dating, those websites, or what’s your opinion on how those work?

Ty Tashiro : Well, I think it’s great in the sense that it expands the pool dramatically. And there’s, there’s just a study that came out last year, it’s a really nice study of tens of thousands of singles seeing how they met their partner and what the long-term outcomes were and online dating performed just as well as a lot of other traditional ways that we meet people, such as through family or friends or, you know, in person at school or something like that.

Audrey Hamilton : Is there a way to do it wrong? I guess, like, you say if you’re putting in too many requirements, so to speak, into the matching profiles that they have?

Ty Tashiro : Sure, I think that would be one way to really narrow your pool, somehow one of the major advantages of having a lot of people has been taken away from you.

Online dating’s great so as far as data collection because people can actually watch behaviors so instead of just asking on a self-report “What do you want?” or “Who would you choose as a partner?” they’re able to say, “Hey this is what people actually did when they were online.” And there is a great thing that just came out of OkCupid showing how much of the proportion of time people spend on profile pictures and how strongly that correlated with people that they messaged and really at a rate that was a little disheartening.

Audrey Hamilton : What about marriage? We get away from the dating, we get on, we finally meet someone, we’re happy. How can psychological research help determine what makes a lasting happy marriage? Not just a lasting marriage – a happy marriage.

Ty Tashiro : Happily and the ever after, both.

Audrey Hamilton : Exactly.

Ty Tashiro : Well, there’s a lot of good data now and we’re lucky that there’s these prospective studies that catch people before they ever met their partners sometimes. Sometimes, when they’re dating or sometimes when they’re newlyweds and follow them for seven, 10, 13 years and we can see what early predictors were there that predicted who would be satisfied and stable in their relationships.

So there’s also good studies that show how to interact or how to resolve conflict in a marriage. And I think that’s very valuable, of course. But if you want to go back and get it right as early as possible you’d say choosing somebody with certain traits or characteristics, which are strong predictors of long-term satisfaction and stability would probably be the best way to go.

Audrey Hamilton : What sort of things can couples do to sort of enhance their chances of being happy ever after?

Ty Tashiro : Sure, well, one example we give in “The Science of Happily Ever After” is personality traits and personality is great because it’s really how we just described who people are and so it’s a nice intuitive, native kind of thing that we can discern with a good amount of accuracy if we’re not falling in love with somebody. So, that’s the trick. And the good news about that is your friends and family are pretty good judges of personality traits of your partner or of people they don’t know very well they can pick up on personality traits pretty accurately in a relatively short amount of time. And so you take something like agreeableness or kindness, for example, that’s a great predictor of long-term stability and satisfaction.

Audrey Hamilton : So you should give your partner a personality test before …?

Ty Tashiro : Ideally, if you can slip him one. You know, that brings up another good point about strategic self-presentation. And so, partners are on their best behavior early on. And that’s one of the nice things about observer ratings is that people’s personality does tend to come out even though they’re trying to strategically self-present. And if you get an average or an aggregate of those observations you can then use that with some of the knowledge we have to predict who would be a good partner on average and who wouldn’t.

Audrey Hamilton : What can people learn from failed relationships? As you said, you’re in between your relationships, you’re looking back, you know. Why do people continue to make the same mistakes over and over again?

Ty Tashiro : Well, that was one of the first questions that I had in grad school, actually. I was studying stress-related growth with Pat Frasier and I thought, “Boy, these break-ups and divorces are pretty stressful.” And it’s correlated with all kinds of psychopathology, like depression and anxiety disorders, substance-use disorders. And most of the research on break-ups has looked at some of those negative accounts. But there’s a handful of studies that look at, well, what do people learn? Or what do people benefit from when they break up with somebody? And we found that every single person in all of these studies will say that they learned things or had certain growth or benefits from the break-up.

The second question then is, do they actually follow through to them on these things? So if they say they’re going to choose a better partner, let’s say, for example, who’s less neurotic, do they actually then choose somebody who’s less neurotic in the next relationship? And I think the jury’s still out as far as what the data is and what the findings will be about who experiences real growth versus people that maybe are just experiencing positive illusions – they think they've grown but actually wont engage in the behavior that’s congruent with that.

Audrey Hamilton : So you really have to stop and look at – consciously really look – not only look at why maybe it didn't work out with that person, you have to, like you said, develop a strategy moving forward to find the next person that you think would work out, let’s say.

Ty Tashiro : Exactly. So I think you can offer some of the behavioral therapy components and say well what would be tangible or observable marker that I would know I would have done a better job? I had a client that had a great kind of concrete example and she said that she kept dating base guitarists in bands and this tended to be correlated with sensation seeking – really high sensation seeking which led to a lot of bad decisions. And so, you know, one of her markers was, does he play base guitar in a band? If he did, then she said well, I haven’t met my criteria.

Audrey Hamilton : Right. Okay, well Dr. Tashiro, this has been very interesting. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.

Ty Tashiro : Well thanks for having me on.

Audrey Hamilton : For more information please visit our website . With the American Psychological Association’s “Speaking of Psychology” I’m Audrey Hamilton.